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In the movie Prisoners, now in theaters, a detective investigates the abduction of two young girls. Things get a little more complicated when the father of one of the girls takes matters into his own hands, kidnapping and torturing the man he thinks is responsible.

The detective, a terse, tattooed cop, is played by Jake Gyllenhaal, an actor perhaps best known for his Oscar-nominated role in the 2005 film Brokeback Mountain. NPR's Audie Cornish visited him on the set of the upcoming film Nightcrawler, where she talked with the actor about Prisoners, torture, and the changes he's been making to his career.

SAC Capital Advisors, has pleaded guilty to wire fraud and securities fraud, agreeing to pay at least $1.2 billion, the largest-ever penalty for insider trading.

The Stamford, Conn.-based hedge fund entered the plea four days after the government announced it had reached a deal with the firm, which is owned by billionaire investor Steven A. Cohen.

Reuters says the agreed upon figure is $1.2 billion, but The Associated Press says it's $1.8 billion.

In July, the firm, one of Wall Street's biggest hedge funds, had initially entered a not guilty plea even though it had agreed in March to pay more than $600 million in penalties related to charges that it participated in an insider trading scheme involving a clinical trial for a new Alzheimer's drug.

Reuters writes:

"U.S. District Judge Laura Taylor Swain said she would refrain from deciding about whether to accept the plea until after she read the pre-sentencing report. She scheduled the sentencing hearing for March 14.

As part of the plea, Nussbaum listed former employees who had been convicted of insider trading charges and described their offenses.

'On behalf of SAC, I want to express our deep remorse for the misconduct of each individual who broke the law while employed at SAC,' he said.

'This happened on our watch, and we are responsible for that misconduct.'"

As a general workplace rule, it's never a good idea to fall asleep on the job. That's especially true if you're a member of Congress.

But Democratic Rep. Mike Honda of California's 17th district nevertheless appears to have been caught twice on camera dozing off in public recently — once at a town hall meeting and another time on the House floor.

Honda is far from the first member of Congress caught napping on the job. And the congressman's communications director has explained Honda was not sleeping in either instance — the 72-year-old often closes his eyes when he's thinking.

Still, the optics could prove problematic for the seven-term congressman, who is in the middle of the toughest battle of his political career.

Honda typically sails to re-election — aside from his first race, he's never earned less than 65 percent of the vote. But in 2014, Honda faces a Democratic primary challenge from a formidable — and considerably younger — foe in 37-year-old Ro Khanna, a former deputy secretary in the Commerce Department under President Obama.

Largely thanks to the support he's received from technology industry leaders — the newly drawn district is now home to the heart of Silicon Valley — Khanna is enjoying an early financial advantage in the race. He raised nearly $1.6 million to Honda's $960,000 and had about three times as much cash on hand at the end of September.

Khanna, who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2004, has also brought on several top Obama campaign officials to his team, including 2012 national field director Jeremy Bird.

The Democratic establishment is sticking behind Honda, though. Obama, Vice President Biden, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair Steve Israel have all endorsed him.

While Khanna, an Indian-American, is tapping the resources of his allies in Silicon Valley, Honda has deep ties to the Asian-American community, which makes up half of the district's population.

Honda and Khanna will face off in California's June 3 "jungle" primary, where the top two vote-getters will move on to the general election regardless of party affiliation. The district is a Democratic stronghold, and the two are the favorites to advance and go head-to-head again in November.

A Palestinian investigator says Israel is the "only suspect" in the 2004 death of the late Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat.

"We consider Israel the first, fundamental and only suspect in Yasser Arafat's assassination," Tawfik Tirawi, head of a Palestinian committee looking into the case, said Friday at a news conference in the West Bank town of Ramallah.

His comments come days after Swiss scientists said they found elevated levels of the radioactive element polonium-210 in Arafat's exhumed remains. As Mark wrote at the time, the scientists said tests "moderately" support the case Arafat was poisoned.

Calling it "the crime of the 21st century," Tirawi dismissed speculation that Arafat died at the hands of rivals within the Palestinian establishment.

Tirawi, who said the investigation would continue, refused to say whether he believed Arafat died from polonium poisoning. And as The Associated Press notes, "he did not present evidence of Israeli involvement, arguing only that Israel had the means and motive to do so. Israel has repeatedly denied it was behind Arafat's death, and did so again Friday, in light of the new allegations."

Israel denied any involvement in Arafat's demise.

"Palestinians should stop leveling all these groundless accusations without the slightest proof because enough is enough," foreign ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor told Reuters. "We have strictly nothing to do with this and that is all there is to it."

At the same news conference in Ramallah, the Palestinian medical expert on the investigative team said a separate Russian report on Arafat found there wasn't enough evidence to conclude that he died from polonium poisoning.

"The outcome of the comprehensive report on the levels of polonium-210 and the development of his illness does not give sufficient evidence to support the decision that Polonium-210 caused acute radiation syndrome leading to death," said Dr. Abdullah Bashir, the medical expert, quoting from the report.

Bashir said both the Russian and the Swiss reports did find large amounts of the isotope in Arafat's remains. A team of French scientists has yet to release a report on its findings.

Mark wrote this week:

It was almost a year ago that Arafat's grave was opened in the West Bank city of Ramallah so that samples could be taken. Palestinian officials took the unusual step because Arafat's widow, Suha Arafat, said earlier in 2012 that traces of the radioactive element had been found on clothing that belonged to her husband.

"Expectations are really going up quickly" in Geneva, Switzerland, that negotiators could announce Friday that they've reached a "first-step agreement that contains the first real limits on Iran's nuclear program in nearly a decade," NPR's Peter Kenyon reported on Morning Edition.

Secretary of State John Kerry is joining the diplomats in Geneva — adding a stop at the talks to a trip he's been on — and France's foreign minister may also drop in, Peter reports. Their presence has ramped up speculation about an agreement.

Thor: The Dark World

Director: Alan Taylor

Genre: Action adventure

Running Time: 120 minutes

Rated PG-13 for sequences of intense sci-fi action and violence, and some suggestive content.

With: Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tom Hiddleston, Christopher Eccleston, Anthony Hopkins

All Tech Considered

What We Learned When Twitter Filed For Its IPO

On September 23rd, 1987, opening night of a Sweet Charity revival in Washington D.C., Bob Fosse and his ex-wife and collaborator Gwen Verdon gave the cast a final pep-talk, then left the National Theater to get a bite to eat. They turned right, and about a block away, unknown to the gathering audience, or the cast, Fosse collapsed on the sidewalk. Newspapers the next morning said he died at 7:23 PM.

I was inside that theater. I later calculated what was happening at 7:23. It was a quintessential Fosse moment: a stage-wide bar rising from the floor, a line of dance hall hostesses draping themselves over it, bait for big spenders. Here you can listen to him stage the movie version a few years later.

Twitter's IPO is Thursday's sexy business story.

But the really big business news is that "the European Central Bank startled investors Thursday with a surprise cut in its benchmark interest rate." As The Associated Press adds, "The bank lowered the benchmark refinancing rate to a record low 0.25 percent from 0.5 percent."

Here's why that's important:

"This was the European Central Bank," writes Neil Irwin at The Washington Post's Wonk Blog. "The hard-line, inflation-phobic, Germany-based institution that sets monetary policy for the 17-nation euro zone and has been reluctant to do anything that might risk even the eensiest bit of inflation. ... Analysts had assigned only perhaps a one-in-four or so chance it would make such a move, and thought it more likely the ECB would drag its feet and wait for more data to prove that Europe is falling into a Japan-style deflation trap."

Twitter's IPO is Thursday's sexy business story.

But the really big business news is that "the European Central Bank startled investors Thursday with a surprise cut in its benchmark interest rate." As The Associated Press adds, "The bank lowered the benchmark refinancing rate to a record low 0.25 percent from 0.5 percent."

Here's why that's important:

"This was the European Central Bank," writes Neil Irwin at The Washington Post's Wonk Blog. "The hard-line, inflation-phobic, Germany-based institution that sets monetary policy for the 17-nation euro zone and has been reluctant to do anything that might risk even the eensiest bit of inflation. ... Analysts had assigned only perhaps a one-in-four or so chance it would make such a move, and thought it more likely the ECB would drag its feet and wait for more data to prove that Europe is falling into a Japan-style deflation trap."

Shonda Rhimes says the Washington she's created for the political drama Scandal is a dark, amoral one — and "a little Shakespearean," in the way it's a place where big themes play out among powerful people who aren't afraid to make bold moves.

"In the world of the show, [our] America sees Washington as this fairytale-beautiful place, and everybody who works there is really helping keep that illusion alive," the series creator tells Morning Edition's Renee Montagne.

"But they're all very much aware that with that peeled away, they're just monsters set adrift in a world where there are no rules."

Rhimes says the casting of star Kerry Washington was a choice driven by some very specific ideas about the character. And yes, those ideas included some of the racial cluelessness Olivia Pope might encounter, as someone singular and powerful enough to often be the only black person in a room — even a modern-day room.

"There were certain things about that job ... there were ways in which she [might] be treated that I thought were very specific to the black experience," Rhimes says. "We did an episode where she walks into the room, and the client immediately assumes that Abby — the tall, white redhead she works with — is Olivia Pope."

"That's a thing that's happened to me," Rhimes says.

The End Is In Sight (Not That She's Telling How Far Out)

Unlike the long-running medical drama Grey's Anatomy, another of Rhimes' hit shows, Scandal is a project with a clear expiration date. In Rhimes' head, anyway.

"I knew the end of Grey's Anatomy, and then we kept going, so that I finally just had to write that and move past it," Rhimes says. "Who knows, at this point, how long that show's going to go? It's going to go as long as I feel interested in what happens to those characters."

Not so Scandal — most likely. Currently in its third season, it's a "different kind of show."

"It is very political," Rhimes says. "The political landscape on the outside, in the real world, will change — possibly before Scandal is over."

"But I feel like there is a finite amount of Scandal to be told," she continues. "So I know what the end of Scandal will be, and I feel really good about that. And I can see where the end point is. And I don't think I'm going to change that. ... I know how long I think it will be. But we'll see."

This past weekend's Saturday Night Live was the most-watched episode of the season, but viewers may have been looking for something other than laughs. Saturday's show followed weeks of criticism over SNL's painfully obvious lack of diversity.

Al-Qaida's North African affiliate said Wednesday it is responsible for the kidnapping and killing of two French journalists in Mali over the weekend.

A website used by al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) said that Radio France Internationale's senior correspondent Ghislaine Dupont and a production technician for the network, Claude Verlon, were killed in response to France's "new crusade."

Sahara Media, a website used by the jihadists, said the killings were an answer to the "'daily crimes' committed by French and Malian forces in northern Mali," where France launched a military operation in January to flush out the Islamic extremists, The Associated Press says.

"The organization considers that this is the least of the price which (French) President Francois Hollande and his people will pay for their new crusade," the statement reads.

However, AP reports:

"A Mali intelligence official involved in the case said investigators believe the kidnapping was the work of a lower-level jihadist trying to return to the good graces of the al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb after being accused of stealing money. The militant is believed to have been reporting to Abdelkarim al-Targui, a prominent Malian in the al-Qaida branch, the official said."

Does a citizen of any country, not just the good ole U.S. of A., have an obligation to support its national teams? For goodness sake, it's just a game, not Horatius at the Bridge standing between us and national defeat.

The fact is, too, that because the U.S. is so powerful, our team is usually the favorite, and, hey, it's natural to root for the underdog. Somehow I don't think it makes you a traitor if, say, you take a liking to somebody like itsy-bitsy Lithuania when it battles our juggernaut of NBA all-stars in international basketball competition. After all it's not the Nationalism Broadcasting Company that brings us the Olympics.

Click on the audio link above to hear Deford's take on this issue.

For decades, Charlie Trotter's name was synonymous with cutting-edge cuisine. His Chicago restaurant was regarded as one of the finest in the world — a stellar accomplishment for the self-taught chef, who died Tuesday at age 54.

Trotter earned a college degree in political science, but as he told NPR last year, he decided cooking was his calling, so he studied cookbooks, visited fine restaurants abroad, catered small parties at home and started working for prominent chefs.

"My motive was nothing more [than] to learn how to cook and explore the interesting components of the food and wine world," Trotter told Talk of the Nation's John Donvan. "I never had an agenda."

But Trotter said he did want to elevate American cooking. And in 1987, with the help of his father, he opened his own restaurant. He took the novel step of putting a table for guests in the kitchen.

He went on to write several cookbooks and host a PBS television series, The Kitchen Sessions with Charlie Trotter. His restaurant won Michelin stars, and Trotter won a James Beard Foundation award for outstanding chef in 1999.

Susan Ungaro, the president of the foundation, says Trotter told her that chefs are like musicians: "That every ingredient is like a musician's note, and he laughed and said, 'My father must have known I must have wanted to be a chef after he named me Charlie after Charlie Parker, the great jazz musician.' He was somebody who really took the artistry of cuisine to another level."

Food

Leftover Turkey: Bright Ideas From Pro Cooks

Vice President Joe Biden's name didn't appear on any ballots Tuesday, but he still had a busy election night.

Prominent politicians often call members of their own party to congratulate them on a successful campaign. But it appears Biden is an especially diligent practitioner, making 10 phone calls to winning candidates in state and local races across the country Tuesday, according to USA Today.

The call that got the most attention was the one the vice president made went to John Lundell, the winner of the Coralville, Iowa, mayoral election.

In political terms, the congratulatory call was a two-fer. Iowa, of course, holds the first caucuses of the presidential election cycle and Biden is a prospective 2016 candidate.

But Lundell's win also represented a setback for Americans for Prosperity, a national conservative organization funded in part by the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch, which made an effort to defeat Lundell and three city council members.

"He indicated that he was very proud of our city, that we took on the Koch brothers and successfully beat them by such a huge margin," Lundell said of Biden. "That was another aspect of this election that was unanticipated, that after the polls closed that I'd be speaking to the vice president of the United States."

Biden also made sure to remember his roots Tuesday.

An alumnus of Syracuse University's law school, Biden reached out to Syracuse Mayor Stephanie Miner just minutes after the polls closed. According to Miner, who also serves as the New York State Democratic Committee's chair, he said that he couldn't actually find the results online, but that he knew she would win re-election.

"He said I'm very proud of you. You're doing great work there. I love you. Congratulations," Miner said. "He called me kiddo."

Biden also personally congratulated Ed Pawloski, the mayor of Allentown, Pa., which is about 75 miles south of Biden's birthplace of Scranton.

The vice president's night wasn't without its hiccups, however. Biden tried to place a call to Boston Mayor-elect Marty Walsh, but instead he got the wrong Marty Walsh.

"You son of a gun, Marty!" You did it!" he told the Marty Walsh who is not going to be Boston's mayor, but was a staffer for the late Sen. Ted Kennedy. Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak made the same mistake.

In addition, Biden phoned former Democratic National Committee chair Terry McAuliffe, who he stumped for the day before the election, to congratulate him on his win in the Virginia governor's race. The list of other victors who received Biden calls Tuesday included Chapel Hill, N.C., Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt and Hoboken, N.J., Mayor Dawn Zimmer.

As for President Obama, he made congratulatory calls to McAuliffe, Walsh and New York City Mayor-Elect Bill de Blasio Tuesday night and Republican Gov. Chris Christie Wednesday.

Since childhood, Rami Aizic knew he "needed and wanted to be a dad." He assumed he would one day meet the girl of his dreams and it would all just happen.

Then he realized he was gay.

Robin Share also wanted kids, but had no partner. So when a mutual friend told Rami about Robin, he called her up and left a message: "Hi, Robin. I'm a friend of Scott's and he said you might be interested in having a baby with me. So give me a call back."

The two hit it off and began making plans — and then Robin met someone. It almost derailed the process, but a few weeks later, Robin knew he "wasn't Mr. Right."

Rami, Robin and their daughter, now 14, consider themselves a family. They don't live under one roof, but spend holidays and other important events together as much as possible.

"Do you ever have any regrets?" Rami asks Robin.

"Never," Robin says. "Couldn't be more perfect."

Audio produced for Morning Edition by Katie Simon.

Technology giant Apple is buying a large manufacturing space in Arizona, where high-tech glass for its devices will be produced. The move is being hailed in Arizona, where the economy remains slowed by the U.S. housing market crisis.

From Phoenix, Mark Moran of member station KJZZ reports for our Newscast unit:

"Between the people needed to get an abandoned building ready to makes Apple's sapphire glass and those who will actually make it, the tech giant's foray into Arizona will create about 2,000 jobs in an area still struggling to recover from the housing bust that left many more than that out of work.

"Apple bought an abandoned solar power company building in the Phoenix suburb of Mesa, and expects its sapphire operation to start generating significant revenue for the company next year.

"The sapphire glass will actually be made by GT Advanced Technologies, a supplier for Apple, and used in the covers for the camera lenses in Apple's phones and the fingerprint-reading devices in some of its other products."

Virginia Tea Party Republican Ken Cuccinelli lost a closer-than-expected contest for governor Tuesday to Democrat Terry McAuliffe, a weak but well-financed and well-connected candidate.

By Wednesday morning, the political world was busy debating the meaning of the outcome in Virginia, where exit polls showed that voters expressed increasing antipathy to the Tea Party, and that it was women — particularly unmarried women — who propelled McAuliffe over the finish line.

We turned to longtime Virginia Republican Chris Saxman, a retired businessman and former member of the Virginia House of Delegates, and to Kyle Kondik of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, where he is managing editor of Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball political site.

Here's what they had to tell us today about the Tea Party, women, and the effect that Obamacare and the government shutdown may — or may not — have had on the race.

NPR: The Virginia contest has been characterized by some as a referendum: Obamacare vs. the politics of the government shutdown. And that McAuliffe's narrow win suggests that voters have bigger issues with the Tea Party shutdown than the Obamacare rollout debacle. That's pretty simplistic, obviously, but how much did those issues affect the outcome?

Saxman: In the last month, those two issues did dominate and had a big effect on turnout. In the end, the reaction to Obamacare was more noticeable in the outcome, versus what polling had showed throughout. Voters really were not impacted by the Tea Party, per se, as it is too organic. This was a very negative campaign from the beginning, and the narrative against Cuccinelli was magnified by the shutdown. Clearly there was a winner — Terry McAuliffe. He raised a lot of money and spent it well on organizing his voters and getting them to the polls. That's what wins campaigns.

Kondik: I'm not sure that either the shutdown or the Obamacare rollout played outsized roles in this race. Democrats argue, and they have internal polling to back it up, that this race was pretty stable for the past several months. I'm inclined to agree, because even though the public polling overshot McAuliffe's victory margin, McAuliffe had led in the public polls for months, too. That suggests that the events of the campaign, and the national climate, did not dramatically alter this race. That said, I think it's reasonable to suggest that McAuliffe was slightly hurt in the end by President Obama's unpopularity and the Obamacare rollout. Ultimately, though, the electorate was too locked in to shift all that much in the final stages of the contest.

NPR: Women voted overwhelmingly for McAuliffe, especially unmarried women, though the overall percentage breaking for the Democrat was far less than recent polls suggested it might be. But what does it tell you that Republicans are hailing the fact that McAuliffe "only" won women by nine points?

Saxman: It could be an indication that women see Obamacare in the same light that many women saw social issues — an infringement of their rights. Republicans should take little comfort in losing a key demographic, especially women, by nine points.

Kondik: The truth is, women are almost always more Democratic than men are in nearly every race for which we have exit polls over the last decade. A 12-point gender gap in this race — McAuliffe won women by nine and Cuccinelli won men by three – is a very normal result. In terms of the gender gap, there's nothing out of the ordinary for either party to crow about, really.

NPR: The dominant theme coming out of the Tea Party ranks this morning has been that the Republican National Committee "betrayed" or "sold out" Tea Party candidates, claiming that what they characterized as limited money it provided Cuccinelli left him at a great disadvantage, especially in the final weeks and while McAuliffe was still awash in funds. How would you characterize the RNC's role?

Saxman: Well, that fits their narrative of being anti-establishment. They cannot expect to run against the establishment and expect them to finance campaigns when their candidates are losing outside the margin of error at the time when funding decisions are made. So they were not "sold out" or "abandoned." Cuccinelli was losing when those decisions had to be made. Allocation decisions are some of the toughest ones in a campaign. Had Cuccinelli been within the margin of error, the money needed to close out the campaign might have been there to support the last two weeks on the air. If the shutdown had not occurred, and for as long as it did, the results would have been different. Actions have consequences. It was not retribution, it was political math.

Kondik: Republicans are probably privately happy that Cuccinelli is out of the picture — he's a controversial figure who would have said and done controversial things if he had been elected governor, which is also why the Tea Party really likes him. Again, though, it's not clear that the race changed all that much on Election Day. It's possible that the public polls were just off. Meanwhile, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie had his own re-election campaign to execute, and helping Ken Cuccinelli wouldn't help Christie run up the score back home. Had Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling been the GOP nominee, I can definitely imagine more Republicans, including even Christie, coming to Virginia to campaign on his behalf.

NPR: Yesterday's races — not only in Virginia, where McAuliffe attracted some high-profile GOP business support, but in Alabama, where a Republican supported by the business community defeated a Tea Party opponent in a congressional primary — highlighted the party's business/Tea Party tensions. How significant is that split in Virginia, and how significant was it in determining last night's result?

Saxman: The business community in Virginia, like all constituencies, supports those who have earned their support. Many in the business community prefer candidates who focus on fiscal and economic issues. McAuliffe did a good job of winning many of those votes along with their contributions. He worked hard for that support.

Kondik: Plenty of establishment, business-oriented Republicans endorsed McAuliffe in this race, but ultimately the exit polls showed that Cuccinelli did just fine with self-identified Republicans: He won 92 percent of them, and McAuliffe won 95 percent of Democrats, meaning that both candidates did just fine with their own bases. In other words, for all the public breaks that Republicans had with Cuccinelli, the rank and file got behind their party's candidate, which is what we should expect in an era where ticket-splitting is uncommon and the vast majority of voters — yes, even those who call themselves independents — actually identify pretty strongly with one party or the other.

NPR: If you could summarize what led to last night's gubernatorial result in a sentence, what would it be?

Saxman: Terry McAuliffe worked hard to unite his party and won more votes than Ken Cuccinelli, whose campaign could not overcome internal party divisions — and, in a base-centric election, that matters.

Kondik: Faced with two unappetizing choices, Virginia voters took the lesser of two evils, ultimately deciding that Terry McAuliffe would rock the boat less than Ken Cuccinelli.

As the NASCAR season climaxes, America's prime motor sport continues to see its popularity in decline. For several years now, revenues and sponsorship have plummeted, leaving an audience that increasingly resembles the stereotype NASCAR so desperately thought it could grow beyond: older white Dixie working class.

Both ESPN and the Turner Broadcasting Co., longtime NASCAR networks, took a look at the down graphs and the down-scale demographics and didn't even bother to bid on the new TV contract.

Economics, of course, are part of the problem. Not as many folks can gas up the big old RV and head off to a long weekend at a track a ways away.

But there may be a couple other more fundamental problems NASCAR should face up to.

Click on the audio link above to hear Deford's take on this issue.

As a child, your heart is broken when you learn that your grandfather really can't pull real quarters out of your ear. And if you're a baseball fan, that disillusionment happens once more to you in life when you first hear the numbers mavens tell you that there is no clutch hitter. None. No such thing.

Oh my, but if you have any romance in your soul, you do so want to believe that there are people in all walks of life whom we can count on to rise to the occasion. Don't you want that?

Click on the audio link above to hear Deford's take on this issue.

This is the second story in a two-part report about sexual assault of agricultural workers in the U.S. Read part one.

It started with a missing paycheck.

In 2006, Guadalupe Chavez, a farm worker in California's Central Valley, was supposed to earn $245 for a week of picking pomegranates. It was money the widowed mother of two needed urgently to pay her bills. When she went to track down the check, a supervisor she'd never met before told her someone had it out in the fields. He said to follow him there in her car.

He stopped in an isolated pistachio orchard, she says. Then, she says, he got out of his truck and demanded her underpants in exchange for her paycheck.

"He said, 'I'm the supervisor, I'm in charge here.' And I remembered that he had told me that he had a gun in his truck," Chavez says in Spanish. "And so when he said that, and he banged hard on the car with his hand, I thought, 'He's serious. If I don't do what he says, he can kill me.' "

Around the Nation

Silenced By Status, Farm Workers Face Rape, Sexual Abuse

In a global economy, does it make sense to allow workers to move freely?

Letting people go where the jobs are would improve the lives of millions around the world, some argue. But others say an influx of labor into the richest countries would devalue workers' worth and actually hurt more in the long run.

A group of experts recently took on this question in an Oxford-style debate for Intelligence Squared U.S. They faced off two against two on the motion "Let Anyone Take A Job Anywhere."

Before the debate, the audience at New York City's Kaufman Center voted 46 percent in favor of the motion and 21 percent against, with 33 percent undecided. After the two sides faced off, 42 percent voted in support of the motion while 49 percent voted against — making the side arguing against the motion the winners.

More From The Debate

Enlarge image i

One of the big questions facing social media giant Twitter ahead of its New York Stock Exchange debut this week is how much money it could actually make for investors.

"We have incurred significant operating losses in the past, and we may not be able to achieve or subsequently maintain profitability," the company writes, in its business prospectus.

Twitter expects revenue growth, but that it will be slow. We've written before on how it's planning on cornering mobile advertising as its main revenue booster. These user numbers a new Pew/Knight study out this week help its argument.

Even though Facebook dwarfs Twitter in the number of users (Facebook's at more than one billion to Twitter's 200 million), the study shows those who consume news on Twitter are younger, better educated and more mobile than Facebook news consumers. That's a huge selling point for Twitter in its bid to lure advertisers. Pew and Knight note:

"Mobile devices are a key point of access for these Twitter news consumers. The vast majority, 85%, get news (of any kind) at least sometimes on mobile devices. That outpaces Facebook news consumers by 20 percentage points; 64% of Facebook news consumers use mobile devices for news. The same is true of 40% of all U.S. adults overall, according to the survey.

Twitter news consumers stand out for being younger and more educated than both the population overall and Facebook news consumers.

Close to half, 45%, of Twitter news consumers are 18-29 years old. That is more than twice that of the population overall (21%) and also outpaces young adults' representation among Facebook news consumers, where 34% are 18-29 years old. Further, just 2% of Twitter news consumers are 65 or older, compared with 18% of the total population and 7% of Facebook news consumers."

Weeks after denying labor's request to give union members access to health law subsidies, the Obama administration is signaling it intends to exempt some union plans from one of the law's substantial taxes.

Buried in rules issued last week is the disclosure that the administration will propose exempting "certain self-insured, self-administered plans" from the law's temporary reinsurance fee in 2015 and 2016.

That's a description that applies to many Taft-Hartley union plans acting as their own insurance company and claims processor, said Edward Fensholt, a senior vice president at Lockton Cos., a large insurance broker.

The fee starts at $63 per insurance plan member next year. Over three years starting in 2014, the tax has been expected to raise $25 billion.

Unions, a key Obama ally, have increasingly criticized the Affordable Care Act as threatening the generous medical plans held by many members.

Eliminating the reinsurance fee was one of several resolutions adopted at the AFL-CIO's September convention, along with giving union plans access to the health law's tax credits for lower-income members.

In September, the White House said the law disallowed health law tax credits for union members on top of their company insurance. Now the administration seems to be moving toward part — but not all — of what labor wants on the reinsurance fee.

While it intends to waive the fee for 2015 and 2016, unions also wanted it scrapped for 2014, when it will be greatest. Taft-Hartley plans are collectively bargained and run jointly by unions and employers to allow workers to move from job to job without losing coverage.

The AFL-CIO didn't respond to a request for comment.

Although it's too early to tell whether the Department of Health and Human Services will give union plans all of what they want on the fee, last week's language "is how HHS often breaks controversial regulatory news," benefits lawyer R. Pepper Crutcher, Jr. wrote last week. It's not known when the administration will put out a new regulation on reinsurance.

Even if the rules sparing unions are adopted, insurance companies and self-insured employers that hire outside claims administrators would still be liable for the fee.

The reinsurance fee made a cameo appearance in the October debt-ceiling negotiations when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid reportedly proposed delaying it for everybody until 2015. Republicans objected and the delay was not in the final deal.

The fee, scheduled to kick in next year, would shrink to $42 in 2015 and $26 in 2016, disappearing afterwards. It would help insurers absorb the cost of care for people with pre-existing illness enrolling in plans offered through subsidized marketplaces.

Both unions and business have criticized it as penalizing employer-sponsored health insurance to support plans bought directly from insurers.

The fee "takes money from the pockets of each laborer covered by a health and welfare fund and gives it to for-profit insurance companies," Terry O'Sullivan, president of the Laborers International Union of North America, wrote in a letter to President Barack Obama last summer.

A LIUNA spokesman declined to comment. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.

On the home front, he captures the silent grandeur and froideur of his parents' apartment overlooking Gramercy Park, decorated with paintings from William Randolph Hearst's excess lots, which they bought at Gimbels department store. He encapsulates his uneasy relationship with his fastidious, prematurely old father with this anecdote: "As a child, I was expected to be old, too. 'Roger,' he said one day, 'that's no way for a 12-year-old boy to behave.' 'Dad,' I said, 'I'm 8.'"

Readers of Making Toast may remember Rosenblatt's antics entertaining his newly bereaved grandchildren as "Boppo the Great." He tells other stories about his delight in flaunting decorum, even when it meant embarrassing his children by dancing in the street. And he's not afraid of embarrassing himself. He recalls standing side by side at the urinals with a Washington Post editor in the mid-1970s and wondering aloud about why the "n" is pronounced in columnist but not column. Rosenblatt writes, "Without looking up, he said, 'Roger, I wish I had your problems.'"

More on Roger Rosenblatt

Routine Fosters Resilience In 'Making Toast'

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

The Mozambican poet, fiction writer and biologist Mia Couto has won the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, a biennial award sometimes called "The American Nobel." Couto, who has written dozens of books in his native Portuguese, including novels, short stories, poetry collections and a children's book, tells PolicyMic: "It is a sad moment for Mozambique because we are starting a war that we thought would never come back again. So to receive this good news is something like a compensation for me." Sponsored by University of Oklahoma along with the Neustadt family and the journal World Literature Today, the $50,000 prize has been given to writers such as Czeslaw Milosz and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The executive director of World Literature Today, Robert Con Davis-Undiano, says in a statement, "Mia Couto is trying to lift the yoke of colonialism from a culture by reinvigorating its language. A master of Portuguese prose, he wants to lift that burden one word, one sentence, and one narrative at a time, and in this endeavor he has few if any peers."

Catherine Chung speaks to NPR's Kat Chow about writing and embracing the label "Asian-American writer": "I love English. ... I wrote my first poem when I was seven in second grade. It was a haiku; it was my first moment where I felt like I had control over language in a way that I could express myself or understand myself. I was seven and I still remember the thrill of it, and I feel like because of that moment, I became a writer."

For The New York Times, Fares Akram and Jodi Rudoren report on new, Hamas-influenced textbooks used by Palestinian students: "Textbooks have long been a point of contention in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which dueling historical narratives and cultural clashes underpin a territorial fight."

Diana Chien has three poems in The American Reader. In "Paintings at Lascaux," she writes:

"The man is already wearing his death
in his face as he falls.
His fingers splay like crows' feet,
and all his thoughts have fallen
to dust, a little seed, a little clear water."

This past weekend's Saturday Night Live was the most-watched episode of the season, but viewers may have been looking for something other than laughs. Saturday's show followed weeks of criticism over SNL's painfully obvious lack of diversity.

Democrat Bill de Blasio won the New York City mayor's race, defeating Republican Joseph Lhota. He became the first Democrat to win the office since 1989.

The Associated Press declared de Blasio the winner about 45 minutes after the city's polls closed at 9 pm ET. De Blasio had what appeared to be an insurmountable lead in polls heading into Election Day.

The election of de Blasio, an unabashed liberal, marked a definitive end of the Mayor Michael Bloomberg era.

Bloomberg, the billionaire capitalist who led the city for three terms was seen by many New Yorkers as a friend to Wall Street and big business but less concerned with the plight of low and middle-income New Yorkers.

Bloomberg was also seen by many New Yorkers as a Manhattan-centric mayor who ignored the needs of the four outer boroughs.

De Blasio, by contrast, promised to focus his policies on the New Yorkers he accused Bloomberg neglecting during his tenure in City Hall. He singled out issues like income inequality, affordable housing and education for particular emphasis.

A new trend is brewing in the coffee world: coffee prepared by a robot, able to be preordered via cellphone and picked up at an unmanned kiosk, perfectly adjusted to your taste and ready to go.

To some, this might seem lamentable: the beginning of the end of coffee shops as we know them. No more huddling around warm cups of coffee with friends or sipping a refreshing iced latte while reading.

But to others, this might be just what they've waited for: no lines when you're in a rush, and coffee prepared by a machine that is programmed to make it perfectly time and time again.

The latest company to present such a coffee kiosk is Austin-based Briggo. As Quartz recently reported, Briggo opened its first kiosk on the University of Texas' Austin campus in July of this year. The kiosk — dubbed "The Coffee Haus" — takes up about 50 square feet of space, has a nice exterior wood design, and accepts orders either on-site or across campus via a website, informing the customer precisely when the drink will be ready.

Customers are able to control every detail to their liking, including the flavor, the type of sweetener and milk, and the amount of each ingredient. A variety of choices are offered, from espressos and lattes to iced coffees and hot chocolate. If customers create an account online, the system will remember their favorite order (of course, your friendly neighborhood barista probably does the same thing).

While the convenience of such a machine is probably its biggest selling point, consumers who've sampled Briggo's brew tell The Salt that the quality of the coffee is nothing to sniff at, either.

Unlike baristas in training, who need to figure out the tricks of the trade, their robotic counterparts have been programmed to control every aspect of the process, with the goal of creating a consistently tasty product.

"The coffee tastes good and it always tastes the same," Yamit Lavi, a student at UT Austin, tells us. "I would say the consistency of the taste makes it better than a standard coffee shop."

The machine, after all, can measure humidity, temperature, water pressure, timing and other such factors to a T. And while institutions host the coffee kiosks, Briggo retains ownership of the machines so it can closely manage the entire process, from origin of its direct-trade beans to cup in hand.

Briggo isn't the only company to pursue a robotic coffee venture. There's also the Marley Coffee Machine, which croons Bob Marley tunes while the robot within the box prepares coffee from freshly ground beans. And Starbucks' satellite brand, Seattle's Best, is pairing with the company that owns Redbox to set up one-dollar coffee kiosks in hundreds of supermarkets across the country.

And yet, although students at UT Austin enjoy the Briggo "Coffee Haus," many of them still hold on to the value of a real coffee shop experience.

"At coffee shops you can build relationships with the people making your drink and have a more personal interaction," says Mina Ghobrial, another student at UT. "I believe that's very important in today's society, especially since electronics have taken over face-to-face interactions."

The coffee kiosks don't have to eliminate coffee shops altogether. Instead, they can be a nice addition: something there when we need it — and not bad-tasting to boot.

It's only been hours since Kmart announced its Black Friday plan — to remain open for 41 hours in a row beginning early on Thanksgiving Day. But online critics are throwing a red light on the plan, with some calling the company a Grinch for its aggressive approach to the start of the Christmas shopping season.

"Everybody thinks your executives are horrible people," a man named Christopher Sweet wrote on Kmart's Facebook page. Another critic, Ted Talevski, appealed to the workers: "This is a message to all Kmart employees! Do not go to work on Thanksgiving Day!"

Responding to the negative feedback, Kmart says that it will try to staff its stores with seasonal workers to accommodate employees who want to be with friends and relatives.

Amber Camp, who says she works at Kmart, said via Facebook that her bosses "are planning on all the employees to have some time so we can actually spend time with our families on Thanksgiving."

The criticisms began flowing soon after Sears, Kmart's parent company, announced that the stores that long promoted "blue light specials" will be open from 6 a.m. on Thanksgiving morning to 11 p.m. Friday night.

Sears stores will work a less aggressive schedule, opening from 8 p.m. on Thanksgiving night to 10 p.m. Friday.

"Kmart has opened at 6 a.m. on Thanksgiving for the past three years," reports CNN Money, where we spotted the story about the backlash. "Last year, however, stores closed for a few hours at 4 p.m. to let shoppers and employees get to their Thanksgiving dinners."

The company's social media team repeatedly issued responses to the criticisms on Facebook, saying, "We understand many associates want to spend time with their families during the holiday. With this in mind Kmart stores do their very best to staff with seasonal associates and those who are needed to work holidays."

One person offered their own response to a similar statement on Twitter, saying, "yes, that's what the companies I worked for told us too, however we had no choice in the matter and I doubt your associates do either."

But some defended the move, saying that many retail employees would be happy to earn overtime. And others say they aren't bothered by the plan.

"Nobody is physically forcing employees to work at Kmart if they don't like the scheduling," one Facebook comment read.

A new trend is brewing in the coffee world: coffee prepared by a robot, able to be preordered via cellphone and picked up at an unmanned kiosk, perfectly adjusted to your taste and ready to go.

To some, this might seem lamentable: the beginning of the end of coffee shops as we know them. No more huddling around warm cups of coffee with friends or sipping a refreshing iced latte while reading.

But to others, this might be just what they've waited for: no lines when you're in a rush, and coffee prepared by a machine that is programmed to make it perfectly time and time again.

The latest company to present such a coffee kiosk is Austin-based Briggo. As Quartz recently reported, Briggo opened its first kiosk on the University of Texas' Austin campus in July of this year. The kiosk — dubbed "The Coffee Haus" — takes up about 50 square feet of space, has a nice exterior wood design, and accepts orders either on-site or across campus via a website, informing the customer precisely when the drink will be ready.

Customers are able to control every detail to their liking, including the flavor, the type of sweetener and milk, and the amount of each ingredient. A variety of choices are offered, from espressos and lattes to iced coffees and hot chocolate. If customers create an account online, the system will remember their favorite order (of course, your friendly neighborhood barista probably does the same thing).

While the convenience of such a machine is probably its biggest selling point, consumers who've sampled Briggo's brew tell The Salt that the quality of the coffee is nothing to sniff at, either.

Unlike baristas in training, who need to figure out the tricks of the trade, their robotic counterparts have been programmed to control every aspect of the process, with the goal of creating a consistently tasty product.

"The coffee tastes good and it always tastes the same," Yamit Lavi, a student at UT Austin, tells us. "I would say the consistency of the taste makes it better than a standard coffee shop."

The machine, after all, can measure humidity, temperature, water pressure, timing and other such factors to a T. And while institutions host the coffee kiosks, Briggo retains ownership of the machines so it can closely manage the entire process, from origin of its direct-trade beans to cup in hand.

Briggo isn't the only company to pursue a robotic coffee venture. There's also the Marley Coffee Machine, which croons Bob Marley tunes while the robot within the box prepares coffee from freshly ground beans. And Starbucks' satellite brand, Seattle's Best, is pairing with the company that owns Redbox to set up one-dollar coffee kiosks in hundreds of supermarkets across the country.

And yet, although students at UT Austin enjoy the Briggo "Coffee Haus," many of them still hold on to the value of a real coffee shop experience.

"At coffee shops you can build relationships with the people making your drink and have a more personal interaction," says Mina Ghobrial, another student at UT. "I believe that's very important in today's society, especially since electronics have taken over face-to-face interactions."

The coffee kiosks don't have to eliminate coffee shops altogether. Instead, they can be a nice addition: something there when we need it — and not bad-tasting to boot.

In recent years, companies ranging from JPMorgan Chase to Walmart to Boeing have announced special hiring programs for veterans. Seattle coffee giant Starbucks is the latest.

All of these companies are trying to bring down a stubbornly high unemployment rate for veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. But to succeed, companies have to take the time to understand the skills of service members.

For 37 years, Carrol Stripling served in the U.S. Army, both active duty and reserves, mostly as a paralegal. She retired from the military in 2011, and then worked for the state of Washington until she got laid off this year.

Stripling says she faces a trifecta of possible obstacles: She's 62 years old; she has a military background; and as a woman, she's not who people think of when they imagine a veteran.

"It's real hard for veterans to say, 'I need help,' because we're taught from the very beginning to be self-reliant," Stripling says. "So it's difficult to say, 'I'm failing at this.' And basically, I feel like I'm failing at this."

Rob Porcarelli is a staff attorney at Starbucks who helped dream up the plan announced Wednesday. Starbucks will hire at least 10,000 veterans or their spouses over the next five years.

Porcarelli was a prosecutor in the Navy in the 1990s. But when he started hunting for a civilian job, he encountered prejudice. "In one interview downtown, the head of the department said, 'You know, Rob, I think you're going to find more of the intellectual type in the law firm environment.' And I remember thinking, 'Maybe he's joking. Did he just call me and all my friends stupid?' "

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates sits on Starbucks' board. He says sometimes people coming out of the service have a hard time translating their skills. That's why the company will have a recruiter specialized in hiring service members.

"It may be a little tougher for business at the beginning of the process, but I think the long-term benefits are tremendous," Gates says. The jobs will range from making lattes to supply chain management.

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz says it's complicated to tease out why transitioning back to civilian employment is hard, but companies can help.

"Businesses and business leaders have an obligation and a responsibility to do something about that and to meet these people more than halfway," Schultz says.

The Institute for Veterans and Military Families at Syracuse University estimates that a few hundred thousand veterans have been hired through targeted programs in the past two years. That's probably shaved a percentage point or two off their unemployment rate.

But Russell Burgos of Pepperdine University, who himself is an Iraq War vet, says it's hard to pin down the numbers. "We don't know how many people apply for jobs at job fairs, how many fill out applications, how many are hired, and I think most importantly, what the employment outcomes of those who are hired turn out to be," Burgos says.

That's why Starbucks plans to have a program manager to help with veteran retention, and the company says it will provide updates on hiring.

Stripling, the Army vet, says she's applied to Starbucks before. but not as a barista. "I've already done my entry-level career," she says.

This summer, she applied there for paralegal positions. And even with her decades of experience, she didn't get a response. She plans to apply to Starbucks again. And this time, she hopes she'll get somewhere.

When it finally came out Tuesday, the September jobs report — delayed for 18 days by the government shutdown — showed a labor market moving forward. But the pace was slow enough to prompt many economists to view it as a letdown.

Job growth "is disappointing, given that employment is still down by about 1.8 million from its peak prior to the recession," Gus Faucher, senior economist with PNC Financial Services Group, said in his analysis.

The Labor Department said employers added 148,000 jobs last month — the 43rd straight month of growth. The unemployment rate slipped to 7.2 percent, down a 10th of a point from August. Still, the number of people with paychecks remained lower than before the Great Recession, with many potential workers not even in the game. They were sitting at home, rather than trying to find jobs.

The report showed labor-force participation was unchanged in September at 63.2 percent, but that rate's "long-term decent will continue" unless employers give sidelined workers more reason to resume job searches, Doug Handler, an economist with IHS Global Insight, wrote in his assessment.

Still, beneath the disappointing data, one could find some reasons for optimism in the new year. For one thing, economists are virtually unanimous in saying the relatively weak labor market makes it more likely the Federal Reserve will continue its efforts to stimulate growth.

Throughout the recession and weak recovery, the Fed has used all of its monetary tools to push down interest rates. One of those efforts involves a bond-buying program that has the effect of restraining long-term interest rates. In June, the Fed indicated that U.S. economic growth was getting strong enough that the central bank might begin to "taper" down its stimulus effort.

But given this month's economic disruptions caused by the federal government shutdown — combined with last month's sluggish job growth — the Fed probably will not act until 2014. "A December taper remains possible, but now is increasingly unlikely," Handler said.

Translation: Interest rates probably will still be low on home mortgages come spring.

Meanwhile, the September jobs report showed an increase in construction jobs, up about 20,000 workers. A separate report Tuesday from the Commerce Department showed that in August, private residential construction spending hit the highest level in five years.

So the real estate market may look pretty good for the spring buying season, with fresh inventory and cheap mortgages. A surge in homebuying would boost growth for lots of Americans, in construction, retail, landscaping and so on.

But that optimism assumes Congress will avoid another shutdown and debt ceiling crisis this winter. Congress has set a schedule for itself to complete a budget in January and resolve debt-ceiling issues by Feb. 7. If those federal fiscal matters are resolved in the winter, the economy could brighten with the blossoms. "Job growth should be stronger in 2014 as the drag from fiscal policy on economic growth lessens," PNC's Faucher said.

It's only been hours since Kmart announced its Black Friday plan — to remain open for 41 hours in a row beginning early on Thanksgiving Day. But online critics are throwing a red light on the plan, with some calling the company a Grinch for its aggressive approach to the start of the Christmas shopping season.

"Everybody thinks your executives are horrible people," a man named Christopher Sweet wrote on Kmart's Facebook page. Another critic, Ted Talevski, appealed to the workers: "This is a message to all Kmart employees! Do not go to work on Thanksgiving Day!"

Responding to the negative feedback, Kmart says that it will try to staff its stores with seasonal workers to accommodate employees who want to be with friends and relatives.

Amber Camp, who says she works at Kmart, said via Facebook that her bosses "are planning on all the employees to have some time so we can actually spend time with our families on Thanksgiving."

The criticisms began flowing soon after Sears, Kmart's parent company, announced that the stores that long promoted "blue light specials" will be open from 6 a.m. on Thanksgiving morning to 11 p.m. Friday night.

Sears stores will work a less aggressive schedule, opening from 8 p.m. on Thanksgiving night to 10 p.m. Friday.

"Kmart has opened at 6 a.m. on Thanksgiving for the past three years," reports CNN Money, where we spotted the story about the backlash. "Last year, however, stores closed for a few hours at 4 p.m. to let shoppers and employees get to their Thanksgiving dinners."

The company's social media team repeatedly issued responses to the criticisms on Facebook, saying, "We understand many associates want to spend time with their families during the holiday. With this in mind Kmart stores do their very best to staff with seasonal associates and those who are needed to work holidays."

One person offered their own response to a similar statement on Twitter, saying, "yes, that's what the companies I worked for told us too, however we had no choice in the matter and I doubt your associates do either."

But some defended the move, saying that many retail employees would be happy to earn overtime. And others say they aren't bothered by the plan.

"Nobody is physically forcing employees to work at Kmart if they don't like the scheduling," one Facebook comment read.

Technology giant Apple is buying a large manufacturing space in Arizona, where high-tech glass for its devices will be produced. The move is being hailed in Arizona, where the economy remains slowed by the U.S. housing market crisis.

From Phoenix, Mark Moran of member station KJZZ reports for our Newscast unit:

"Between the people needed to get an abandoned building ready to makes Apple's sapphire glass and those who will actually make it, the tech giant's foray into Arizona will create about 2,000 jobs in an area still struggling to recover from the housing bust that left many more than that out of work.

"Apple bought an abandoned solar power company building in the Phoenix suburb of Mesa, and expects its sapphire operation to start generating significant revenue for the company next year.

"The sapphire glass will actually be made by GT Advanced Technologies, a supplier for Apple, and used in the covers for the camera lenses in Apple's phones and the fingerprint-reading devices in some of its other products."

A Dutch charity that aims to expose and end "webcam child sex tourism" says it lured tens of thousands of men from around the world to a website where they asked a lifelike, computer-generated 10-year-old Filipino girl named Sweetie to perform sex acts for money.

The charity, Terre des Hommes, said about 20,000 people — most of them men — "made approaches to the virtual girl" over a 10-week period from April to June, as NBC News writes,

Terre des Hommes says it was able to identify 999 men and 1 woman from among those who came to its sting site and has given Interpol its information about those people. The 1,000 come from 71 different nations, the organization says.

The BBC adds that "254 were from the U.S., followed by 110 from the U.K. and 103 from India."

CBS News writes that "it remains to be seen if any of the people identified will be prosecuted, but the research demonstrated that it is relatively easy to find and identify such adults."

Terre des Hommes defines webcam child sex tourism as "when adults pay to direct and view live-streaming video footage of children in another country performing sexual acts in front of a webcam."

It adds that:

— "Sometimes parents or family members coerce children to engage in WCST. Sometimes children are trafficked and held captive in 'dens' with other kids who are forced to perform sexual acts in front of webcams. Sometimes child prostitutes sell webcam sex shows to predators around the world in order to supplement the income they make through street prostitution."

— "Based on our research and the findings of Terre des Hommes Netherlands' partners in the field, the age of child victims of WCST ranges from 6 to 17 years old."

In recent years, companies ranging from JPMorgan Chase to Walmart to Boeing have announced special hiring programs for veterans. Seattle coffee giant Starbucks is the latest.

All of these companies are trying to bring down a stubbornly high unemployment rate for veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. But to succeed, companies have to take the time to understand the skills of service members.

For 37 years, Carrol Stripling served in the U.S. Army, both active duty and reserves, mostly as a paralegal. She retired from the military in 2011, and then worked for the state of Washington until she got laid off this year.

Stripling says she faces a trifecta of possible obstacles: She's 62 years old; she has a military background; and as a woman, she's not who people think of when they imagine a veteran.

"It's real hard for veterans to say, 'I need help,' because we're taught from the very beginning to be self-reliant," Stripling says. "So it's difficult to say, 'I'm failing at this.' And basically, I feel like I'm failing at this."

Rob Porcarelli is a staff attorney at Starbucks who helped dream up the plan announced Wednesday. Starbucks will hire at least 10,000 veterans or their spouses over the next five years.

Porcarelli was a prosecutor in the Navy in the 1990s. But when he started hunting for a civilian job, he encountered prejudice. "In one interview downtown, the head of the department said, 'You know, Rob, I think you're going to find more of the intellectual type in the law firm environment.' And I remember thinking, 'Maybe he's joking. Did he just call me and all my friends stupid?' "

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates sits on Starbucks' board. He says sometimes people coming out of the service have a hard time translating their skills. That's why the company will have a recruiter specialized in hiring service members.

"It may be a little tougher for business at the beginning of the process, but I think the long-term benefits are tremendous," Gates says. The jobs will range from making lattes to supply chain management.

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz says it's complicated to tease out why transitioning back to civilian employment is hard, but companies can help.

"Businesses and business leaders have an obligation and a responsibility to do something about that and to meet these people more than halfway," Schultz says.

The Institute for Veterans and Military Families at Syracuse University estimates that a few hundred thousand veterans have been hired through targeted programs in the past two years. That's probably shaved a percentage point or two off their unemployment rate.

But Russell Burgos of Pepperdine University, who himself is an Iraq War vet, says it's hard to pin down the numbers. "We don't know how many people apply for jobs at job fairs, how many fill out applications, how many are hired, and I think most importantly, what the employment outcomes of those who are hired turn out to be," Burgos says.

That's why Starbucks plans to have a program manager to help with veteran retention, and the company says it will provide updates on hiring.

Stripling, the Army vet, says she's applied to Starbucks before. but not as a barista. "I've already done my entry-level career," she says.

This summer, she applied there for paralegal positions. And even with her decades of experience, she didn't get a response. She plans to apply to Starbucks again. And this time, she hopes she'll get somewhere.

The U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments Wednesday in a case questioning the use of prayer at government meetings. But first, the marshal will ask "God" to "save the United States and this honorable court."

In 1983, the high court ruled that legislatures could begin their sessions with a prayer, as long as there is no attempt to proselytize or disparage any faith, and as long as the process for selecting the prayer-giver is not discriminatory. Since then, dozens of other cases have tested the constitutionality of prayers at government venues other than legislative sessions, with often conflicting rulings in the lower courts. Wednesday's case could produce some guidelines for the future. It involves almost exclusively Christian prayers that took place at one town's board meetings in upstate New York.

Until 1999, the town of Greece, N.Y., opened its board meetings with a moment of silence. But when John Auberger was elected supervisor, he instituted formal prayers, given by a rotating group of clergymen — a group that until 2008 was exclusively Christian. Often prayers were "in the name of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ who lives with you," for instance.

Two women objected to the prayers at board meetings and sued to stop the practice. One is an atheist; the other, Susan Galloway, is Jewish.

Galloway doesn't object to nonsectarian prayers, but she says that prayers alienate people from their government when they are connected to a particular religion. She has felt uncomfortable, she says, when she does not bow her head or stand as invited to do during the prayers.

"I don't feel like ... I'm welcome at my town government anymore," Galloway said in an interview with NPR. "My grandmother had to leave Russia because of the Cossacks. My father had to leave Germany because of Hitler." She feels strongly that Americans must "make sure that our government and religion are separate, because we are a diverse country." This is necessary, she says, to recognize diversity and "protect the minorities' rights."

Supervisor Auberger is no longer granting interviews, but earlier this year, in an interview with PBS, he explained why he instituted and has fought for prayers at board meetings. "Our Founding Fathers believed in the right for us to pray and have that freedom of expression in prayer," Auberger said, and the town of Greece is simply continuing that tradition. There are no guidelines for what prayers are appropriate, he said, because that would amount to censorship.

So, what if someone were to say, "Believe in Jesus or you'll burn in hell"?

"We could not object," Auberger says, "because our purpose is to allow ... a freedom of expression in their prayer."

The town of Greece has in fact become more diverse in its prayers since the lawsuit was filed in 2008. Among those who have offered prayers are a Jewish layman, the leader of a Baha'i assembly and a Wiccan priestess. But the prayers are still overwhelmingly Christian.

"The houses of worship in the Greece community are predominantly Christian," says lawyer Tom Hungar, who represents the town, and the prayer-givers who volunteer will inevitably reflect that make-up. "But anyone is free to pray," he says, and "the plaintiffs in this case were both offered the opportunity to deliver invocations."

"The plaintiffs don't want to give the prayers," responds Douglas Laycock, who represents those challenging the prayers. The town's claim of equal access, he says, is a myth — the board never announced that all comers were welcome to deliver the invocation, nor does it publicize its policy.

"The prayers here advance Christianity and they proselytize Christianity," Laycock says.

Laycock, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law and one of the nation's leading scholars in this area, will tell the justices that town board meetings are very different from sessions of the legislature. Often the board meetings include high school classes, community members who are being honored, and those seeking action from the board.

"The way these meetings are structured, everyone is drawn into participation in the prayer," says Laycock. "You're either part of the prayer or you're visibly outing yourself as a religious dissenter." Ultimately, the challenge is "about protecting religious liberty for everybody, not just the majority but also the religious minorities," he says.

And if the town wants to have prayers at the beginning of meetings, Laycock contends, it should have guidelines for nonsectarian prayers.

But lawyer Hungar, representing the town, counters that the Supreme Court has said repeatedly that the courts should not be in the business of parsing prayers. "Government is not supposed to be in the business of telling prayer-givers what the content of their prayers should be," he says.

The history of this country, Hungar observes, began with public professions of religion. Indeed, prayers opened sessions of the first Congress — the Congress created by the same Constitution that included, as its First Amendment, a ban on government establishment of religion.

Does a citizen of any country, not just the good ole U.S. of A., have an obligation to support its national teams? For goodness sake, it's just a game, not Horatius at the Bridge standing between us and national defeat.

The fact is, too, that because the U.S. is so powerful, our team is usually the favorite, and, hey, it's natural to root for the underdog. Somehow I don't think it makes you a traitor if, say, you take a liking to somebody like itsy-bitsy Lithuania when it battles our juggernaut of NBA all-stars in international basketball competition. After all it's not the Nationalism Broadcasting Company that brings us the Olympics.

Click on the audio link above to hear Deford's take on this issue.

Democrat Terry McAuliffe won the hotly contested Virginia governor's race, defeating Republican Ken Cuccinelli, who was supported by the Tea Party.

The race turned out to be far closer than polls heading into Election Day indicated. That suggested that voter turnout may have failed to reach the levels Democrats had hoped to achieve and that the Affordable Care Act may have hurt the Democratic effort.

McAuliffe, a 56-year old entrepreneur and former Democratic National Committee chair, prevailed in a contest that was particularly negative. His win was the first time a Virginia gubernatorial candidate of the same party holding the White House won since 1977.

The Democratic victory reinforced the state's shift from red to purple. President Obama won the state twice, the first Democrat to win the state since 1964.

Democrats framed the race as a referendum on Cuccinelli, 45, who they labeled an extremist based on his record as the state's attorney general.

After the government shutdown, Democrats hastened to tie Cuccinelli to that as well. Virginia has a large population of federal government workers and contractors who were adversely affected by the shutdown.

Democrats also hit Cuccinelli hard for opposing abortions in virtually all cases which allowed Democrats to attack the Republican as anti-women.

That line of attack proved particularly effective in contributing to a yawning and consistent gender gap favoring McAuliffe that topped 20 percentage points.

Republicans, meanwhile attempted to paint McAuliffe as an unethical businessman, attacks which never appeared to take hold even though McAuliffe wasn't exactly a popular Virginia figure.

They also tried to link the Democrat to the troubled Affordable Care Act, with Cuccinelli, the state's attorney general, arguing that voting for him would provide a firewall against the health-care law in Virginia.

There was polling evidence that Virginia voters were voting not so much for McAuliffe as against Cuccinelli.

Cuccinelli did get some help from some national Republicans like senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio as well as Gov. Bobby Jindal who visited Virginia to campaign for him.

But McAuliffe got far bigger names to campaign with him. In the campaign's final stretch, President Obama and Vice President Biden made appearances at rallies with him. McAuliffe who is close to the Clintons also drew both former President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state, to rallies.

McAuliffe's victory represented a personal vindication. Four years ago he was trounced in the Democratic primary for governor by Democrat Creigh Deeds who went on to lose badly to Republican Bob McDonnell.

Technology giant Apple is buying a large manufacturing space in Arizona, where high-tech glass for its devices will be produced. The move is being hailed in Arizona, where the economy remains slowed by the U.S. housing market crisis.

From Phoenix, Mark Moran of member station KJZZ reports for our Newscast unit:

"Between the people needed to get an abandoned building ready to makes Apple's sapphire glass and those who will actually make it, the tech giant's foray into Arizona will create about 2,000 jobs in an area still struggling to recover from the housing bust that left many more than that out of work.

"Apple bought an abandoned solar power company building in the Phoenix suburb of Mesa, and expects its sapphire operation to start generating significant revenue for the company next year.

"The sapphire glass will actually be made by GT Advanced Technologies, a supplier for Apple, and used in the covers for the camera lenses in Apple's phones and the fingerprint-reading devices in some of its other products."

The pundits always claim that even in an "off year" like this there are messages to be received from the results on Election Day.

So what are a couple of the likely messages we'll be hearing about Tuesday night after the results of today's voting are in?

The big headline, NPR Senior Washington Editor Ron Elving said on Morning Edition, will likely be that the Republican Party's "great moderate hope" won big in New Jersey. Gov. Chris Christie, a potential 2016 contender for the GOP presidential nomination, is expected to easily win reelection. Ron said Christie might even pull in 60 percent or more of the votes.

Headline No. 2 looks to be from Virginia, where polls show Democrat Terry McAuliffe leading Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli in the governor's race. Cuccinelli is a favorite of social conservatives and Tea Party supporters.

The combination of a Christie win in New Jersey and a Cuccinelli loss in Virgina are likely to bring out more analyses that say the Tea Party is losing some of its momentum and the "moderate" wing of the GOP is making a comeback.

As for the other races to watch Tuesday, they include:

— Mayoral contests in New York, Boston, Detroit and Minneapolis.

— Ballot initiatives about hydraulic fracking (Colorado), genetically modified foods (Washington State), marijuana possession (Maine) and whether the Astrodome should be saved or razed (Houston).

Reminder: our friends at It's All Politics are following the news.

On the home front, he captures the silent grandeur and froideur of his parents' apartment overlooking Gramercy Park, decorated with paintings from William Randolph Hearst's excess lots, which they bought at Gimbels department store. He encapsulates his uneasy relationship with his fastidious, prematurely old father with this anecdote: "As a child, I was expected to be old, too. 'Roger,' he said one day, 'that's no way for a 12-year-old boy to behave.' 'Dad,' I said, 'I'm 8.'"

Readers of Making Toast may remember Rosenblatt's antics entertaining his newly bereaved grandchildren as "Boppo the Great." He tells other stories about his delight in flaunting decorum, even when it meant embarrassing his children by dancing in the street. And he's not afraid of embarrassing himself. He recalls standing side by side at the urinals with a Washington Post editor in the mid-1970s and wondering aloud about why the "n" is pronounced in columnist but not column. Rosenblatt writes, "Without looking up, he said, 'Roger, I wish I had your problems.'"

More on Roger Rosenblatt

Routine Fosters Resilience In 'Making Toast'

On this 34th anniversary of the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, thousands of Iranians gathered outside that building to once again chant "Death to America."

But New York Times Bureau Chief Thomas Erdbrink told NPR's Steve Inskeep on Monday that though the shouts were the same as they've been since 1979 and the demonstration was larger than in recent years, the people he interviewed there were not virulently anti-American.

"All the people I spoke with," Erbrink said, "didn't really mind Iran talking to the United States ... [and they] admitted they want to see some sort of solution" to three-plus decades of fractured relations.

Anti-American hardliners, Edbrink added, "who feel their interests will be threatened" if multinational talks lead to a resolution of the impasse over Iran's nuclear ambitions, packed Monday's demonstration with "government workers and schoolkids."

He noted that hardliners are upset about the willingness of new President Hassan Rouhani and his aides to sit down with the U.S. and its partners. Iran wants a lifting of economic sanctions. The nations on the other side of the table want to make sure Iran does not join the list of nations with nuclear weapons.

Over the weekend, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a message that praised and defended the work of Iran's nuclear negotiators, NPR's Peter Kenyon reports from Istanbul. That would seem to be an endorsement of Rouhani's efforts.

But the ayatollah also lent some support to those who organized the "death to America" protest. As Peter reports, the ayatollah said those who stormed the embassy in 1979 — taking hostages who would be held for 444 days — were the first to uncover the "den of espionage" at the diplomatic mission.

Like many Syrian exiles, Murhaf Jouejati, a professor at National Defense University, is frustrated by U.S. policy toward Syria. He says there's been only a trickle of U.S. aid to the secular, nationalist opposition in Syria, while the Islamists have no trouble raising money through their networks in the Arab world.

Parallels

Small Syrian Border Town Magnifies Rift Between Rebel Groups

The small town of Rjukan has long had to make do without sunlight during the cold Norwegian winters.

But that changed Wednesday, when the town debuted a system of high-tech mirrors to reflect sunlight from neighboring peaks into the valley below.

The Two-Way

Norwegian Town's Bright Idea Is A Shining Example Of Ingenuity

Good morning, fellow political junkies.

This week, the political headlines are expected to be dominated by several important off-year elections whose outcomes seem a foregone conclusion, if you believe the polls.

Democrat Terry McAulliffe in Virginia and Republican Chris Christie in New Jersey have significant polling leads in their governor's races. In New York City, Democrat and mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio appears poised to win in a blowout.

But that's tomorrow's news. On Monday, a critical procedural vote is scheduled in the Senate on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act which would give lesbian, gay, bisesexual and transgender workers similar federal protections against workplace discrimination like those protecting most other workers.

And that's a good place to start with a quick look at some of the more interesting pieces of political news or analysis that caught my eye this morning.

The Senate is thought to be one vote away from the 60 needed to advance the ENDA legislation to a final vote. One of several Republican senators is expected to provide the needed vote on a divisive issue for the GOP, the New York Times' Jeremy Peters reported. The bill's prospects in the GOP-controlled House are less certain.

And in an op-ed whose timing couldn't have been better for the ENDA debate, Maine congressman Michael Michaud, a Democrat running for governor, confirms that he's gay in an op-ed in the Bangor Daily News. "Yes, I am. But why should it matter?"

President Obama's aides have had to remake his schedule for the next few months because of the problems with the Affordable Care Act website. The president won't be spending nearly as much time at events urging people to enroll under Obamacare since the website is under repair. Instead, he will do more immigration and economic events, report Carol E. Lee and Peter Nicholas of the Wall Street Journal.

Mitt Romney made news over the weekend by accusing President Obama of "fundamental dishonesty" in his sales pitches for the Affordable Care Act. Appearing on NBC New's Meet the Press, the 2012 GOP presidential nominee said Obama "has undermined the foundation of his second term. I think it is rotting away."

Obamacare giveth. Under the ACA, millions of low-income people will be eligible for health plans that will cost them nothing because of the government-provided subsidies, report the New York Times' Reed Abelson and Katie Thomas.

Obamacare taketh away. The growing political threat to Democrats can be measured in the anecdotes that keep rolling in of people who have to buy more expensive insurance coverage because their older policies aren't being renewed under the law, report the Washington Posts Ariana Euchung Cha and Lena Sun.

Obama's tech buddy, Google chairman Eric Schmidt, slammed the NSA over allegations that the spy agency monitored traffic between the data centers of several Internet giants. He told the Wall Street Journal's Deborah Kan the NSA practices, if true, were "outrageous."

Former House Speaker Jim Wright, 90, was rebuffed on his first attempt to get a voter ID card in Texas, report the Ft. Worth Star Telegram's Terry Evans and Anna M. Tinsley. "Nobody was ugly to us but they insisted that they wouldn't give me an ID," he was quoted as saying.

Channeling his inner Andrew Jackson, Sen. Rand Paul joked (at least we think he was joking) to ABC News' George Stephanopoulos that if dueling weren't illegal in Kentucky he might challenge one of the "hacks and haters" who have accused him of plagiarizing in his speeches.

Small flickering oil lamps known as diyas are lighting up Indian homes in South Asian communities around the globe on Sunday as hundreds of millions of people observe Diwali.

Otherwise known as the Festival of Lights, it's a religious celebration of self-awareness and reflection. Diwali is a public holiday in a number of other nations, but it's not nearly so well-known in the U.S., where families must rely on themselves to keep the tradition alive.

Nestled among old colonial homes in Haverford, Pa., the Shukla home is a vibrant display of light and colorful decoration. Inside the kitchen, it's a feast for the senses. For the Shuklas, Diwali ushers in a new year for self-reflection or, as they put it, finding the light within.

He started at the Air Force's historical records agency down in Alabama, but the search ballooned wildly from there, into the National Archives, and then into interviews with surviving airmen from the unit. And then it continued onto these missions that he began making at least once a year to Palau, with a backpack full of gear, which over time became increasingly complex technology that he would use to try to find the airplane, including magnetometers and infrared film that he believed he might be able to use to see through the water in the channels of the islands. So he would strap himself into the open doorway of a Cessna and have a pilot fly him over these channels and he'd be hanging out, you know, almost parallel to the surface of the water.

But the problem was all of the accounts of what happened to this airplane were different. The stories that family members heard were different from the official story that they heard, which (was) also different from the stories that Palauan tribal elders who had observed the crash heard, and so none of it added up, and it was very hard to even have a sense of where he should be looking.

On the moment when, after a decade of searching, Scannon and his team found what they believed to be the rest of the plane

It was a moment of great joy and also great sorrow ... I've seen footage of the day that that plane was found, and you can see both those emotions so clearly on the faces. There's this sort of ashen-faced horror at having found the wreckage of at least part of this aircraft. And yet there was also this sense that after having spent the first decade of this process searching and searching, wondering, that they had finally come to a point of some clarity about at least where most of the plane and many of the men wound up.

On why the son of one of the airmen traveled to Palau to dive down and see the plane himself

He told me that when he went down to the plane he still wasn't sure whether his father was on it. Like so many families, he had grown up wondering if his father had perhaps found some way to get off the plane and survive. So he got to the dive site and he made his dive down and he saw the waist-gun door — this huge yawning opening where the 50-caliber machine gun sticks out. And he reached out and he touched the plane, and he held on, and he had a conversation with his father for the first time ever, feeling that perhaps his father was there — although he still had no way to know for sure.

Read an excerpt of Vanished

Steve Lickteig's life as he knew it was a lie. Lickteig thought he was the adopted son of a former World War II vet and his wife. Life was simple: They ran a farm in Kansas, went to mass at the local Catholic church and raised Steve and their eight biological children.

Lickteig wondered who his real parents were and thought he'd set out to find them someday. Then, when he turned 18, two of his best friends told him the truth: His adopted parents were actually his biological grandparents. The woman who he knew as his older sister was actually his mother.

Decades after that revelation, Lickteig turned the camera on his own family to try to understand how a secret like this could be kept for so long. Lickteig is the senior producer for NPR's Weekend All Things Considered. His film is called Open Secret and it premieres in the U.S. Sunday night on Al Jazeera America. He joins NPR's Rachel Martin to discuss how his relationship with his family changed after he discovered their secret.